The Arendt, Kant and the Aesthetic-Political Judgments

Abstract

Hannah Arendt read the kantian Critique of Judgment after covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem as correspondent of The New Yorker. For Kant, the faculty of judgment has no relation to logic, it is related to the phenomenon of beauty. Arendt extrapolated the aesthetic judgment to the political sphere and took the aesthetic-political judgments to justify social sciences insights. We shall show that Arendt appealed to aesthetic judgment in three circumstances. First, when she branded as totalitarian the regimes of Hitler and Stalin and excluded them from the prevailing types. Second, when with the formula of the banality of evil, alluded to an original type of criminality. Third, when against the political tradition, identified a new tradition –the revolutionary tradition– and praised exemplary events of the political.